Full Project Description

Massive migration of Ukrainian displaced population fleeing Russian full-scale invasion since February 2022 spotlighted key questions of intensive ongoing intellectual and political disputes around several fundamental issues, such as integration, belonging, cohesion, and memory in the modern societies. The current displacement of Ukrainians, the largest in Europe since the Second World War, could be perceived in various contexts, local, national, regional, and global, in connection to both the relocation of Ukrainian IDPs after 2014 and to the series of recent refuge crises in the EU. Immigration has become a prominent international and national governance issue and a subject of political debates that expose anxieties and concerns on the borders, identities, and hierarchies of belonging in the affected countries. The current debates are mostly concerned with the migrants’ or refugees’ access to economic resources or to political participation. In this project we plan to focus on the social-cultural aspects of refugee’s adaptation, changing collective and individual communicative and cultural memories, and temporal dimensions of belonging that are often overlooked, although they are important factors of social exclusion and othering. Adopting such a research focus would open a possibility for a comparative analysis of Ukrainian case with other societies or social groups that live through the similar experience in Germany, in the region or globally (including but not limited to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, former Yugoslavia and other cases).

Since 2014, the conflict-induced displacement in Ukraine remained practically ‘invisible’ for migration research in Europe, as it was mostly contained within the country. However, it stimulated an unprecedented wave of social mobilization and emergence of the new type of social activism resulting in a new quality of civil society within Ukraine. These processes require special attention as they prepared Ukrainian society to unprecedented resistance and self-aid networking after the beginning of the Russian full-scale invasion in February 2022.

The real scale of the ongoing displacement of Ukrainians could not be foreseen – during the first month of the Russian invasion the number of displaced Ukrainians reached over 12 mln people (including 7 mln IDPs and 5 mln cross-border refugees) (UNHCR 2022). The main transit countries are Poland (2.5 mln border crossings), Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Moldova. Germany is hosting second largest group of Ukrainian refugees in the EU. The new wave of Ukrainian migration poses a wide range of questions to the experts and scholars. Ukrainian refugees in the EU have a very distinctive socio-demographic profile (mostly women with kids and to a lesser extent elderly persons). It has wide implications for the on-going global debates about the principles of migration governance, the perceptions of South and North or East West divides, the decolonization of culture, hierarchies of belonging, global and regional economies of attention, historical memory, and other crucial issues.

Migrants’ sense of belonging, challenged by war and displacement, is shaped through everyday interactions with built environment and social groups, official and unofficial spheres. The study on temporal location of belonging includes exploration of how time is experienced (how, for example, natural flow of biographical time, such as ‘before and after beginning of the war’ is interrupted), as well as how memory and attitudes towards past are utilized in creating a sense of belonging, and underscores the refugees’ agency.

This project uses a multi-scalar optics shifting from the macro-level analysis of politics of memory and identity to the exploration of tensions and interactions between local, regional, national, and, in some cases, transnational or global visions of the past that appear at the level of everyday life experiences of displaced. Moreover, modern communication means radically change relationship between physical setting and social space, enabling participation in multiple communities simultaneously. Recent refugee crisis illustrated that this mechanism could be employed for building transnational solidarity aid networks, pluralization/democratization of historical memory, but that it also becomes a source of reterritorialization of the conflict, identity wars and new lines of exclusion.

Not less important is to analyze how war-caused migration influenced discussions on the politics of memory and identity in academia and in media outlets in the region, marginalizing some issues, such as the Polish-Ukrainian “memory wars”, and rearticulating others, such as the decommunization and decolonization policies. Once again the Second World War experiences and myths became the nodal point in history discussions – in clashing representations of war by the mass propaganda, and in official discourses, such as Ukrainian President Zelensky’ arguments with Western partners (in his contested appeals to German or Israeli societies he contextualized the current Ukrainian resistance and suffering in the experience of the Second World War guilt or the memory of Holocaust).

Structure

The project offers a multi-scalar perspective on the transformational effects of war and dislocation on people’s memory and sense of belonging for both those on move and receiving communities. It will be conducted by an interdisciplinary research group meeting regularly online and making use of collaborative digital working spaces, and formats for collective writing process that have been developed by the Forum.

The established working group will collaboratively run a monthly on-line series of discussions aimed to engage different publics – from the academia, and different think tanks in the East or West of Europe is envisaged. Depending on the focus of the online event, audience might be broadened to the representatives of government, media, and politicians. The project also aims at small-scale data collection and production of shorter texts/interviews/short essays or research papers that will be published with the TRAFO space and later be reworked either into a special issue in one of the leading academic journals or as an open access publication in the Forums Dossier Series.

The  project is constituted by scholars from Ukraine, it is directed by Dr. Viktoriya Sereda (Ukrainian Catholic University, Lviv / Senior Fellow of the Forum Transregionale Studien 2022/23), and funded by by the Berlin Senate Department for Higher Education and Research, Health, Long-Term Care and Gender Equality. The non-resident Fellowships are funded by the Marga and Kurt Möllgaard Foundation, and  the Zeit-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius.